Re: MP3 players? Linux? I'm not sure, but I know there's hate

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: MP3 players? Linux? I'm not sure, but I know there's hate
Date: 13:35 on 23 Apr 2005
> Dammit, I hate being wrong, but I especially hate having wrong hopes. :/

I've been there. I started out avoiding BeOS not because of the design,
which sounded interesting, but because after watching Amiga crash and burn
there's no way I was going to get into something else so obviously
pre-doomed. Then when I started learning about it, at an abstract level,
I got hopeful and excited. Then I started reading the details of how it
came together and I recoiled in pain.

C++ really is that bad.

RPC really is that bad.

Threads really are that painful.

> It was a bad example, but just the phrase "cd into the file" points out
> how retarded the whole idea is.

Why? What's wrong with cd-ing into a file?

OS/1100 files were structured objects, containing elements, and people used
them like directories and used elemets like files.

Windows Explorer lets you open any archive file it's aware of and treat it as
a directory tree.

The difference between a directory containing files with known names and a
file containing attributes or forks with known names is just a matter of
API design. Semantically they're the same thing... and a simple API is
ALWAYS better than a complex one.

> Well, I don't really know what to say, then.  At this point you need to
> decide what is a directory and what is an app, and kind of pick which
> one a given thing is.  Seems like OS X can't really make up its mind.

You're treating the concept "application" as if it's some kind of holy
object that HAS to be reduced to a single file. It's not. An application
can contain many executable elements, images, tables and structured data.

How many files are there making up "perl" or "netscape"?

Making an application into a bundle has been a tremendously good thing. It
seemed weird at first, when I ran across the idea in NeXTstep, but it really
does make a lot of obvious "necessary" layers of crap like "installers" and
hunting for the executable in an application directory on Windows and figuring
out all the files you need to remove or update on UNIX when you upgrade
an application scatters across 10 directories in /usr/local... all that
suddenly doesn't matter. It's no longer necessary, because the whole thing
is complete in and of itself.

I now have a lot of hate over systems that DON'T do it that way, and I hate
Gnome and KDE for not being GNUstep with a hate that keeps on giving.

There's stuff above here

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